21st Century Photography At Central Saint Martins

Presented at UAL Central Saint Martins, London, 21st Century Photography: Art, Philosophy, Technique is a trans-disciplinary conference aiming to explore a series of themes that emerge from the understanding of contemporary photography as the basic unit of visual communication in the age of technology: online, off-line and between the lines.

The aim is to bridge the gap between aesthetic, philosophical and technological approaches to the photographic image and to prompt participants from different backgrounds (fine art, critical theory, philosophy, software/hardware) to engage with each other and to open new avenues for the critical interrogation of the roles of images in contemporary culture.

Some of the conference themes are:

• Situating photography within the framework of contemporary philosophy • The aesthetics of repetition, reproduction and copy • The political implications of visual practices • New theoretical models for assessing contemporary image culture • Duration and temporality of the ‘still’ image • Sensorial and bodily experience of photography • Photography and the post-human • Theoretical dimensions of the idea of ‘representation’ • Data, information and algorithms in the visual field • Archiving and curating the immaterial image • Augmented reality and immersive visual environments • Non-visual dimensions of photography

SMBHmag ISSUE7 contributor Valerie Driscoll will be presenting her paper Photography, the Information Machine and the ‘Collective Apparatus, “The cybernetic condition of photography has largely been overlooked by the art discourse. An emphasis on the image encouraged a perception of photography as a means of reflecting the condition of modernity in pictures. With 1.8 billion photographs shared daily on social networks, it is clear that the story of photography as reflection is far from over.”

This two-day conference will include keynote speakers: Prof. Johnny Golding, Professor of Philosophy and Fine Art, Director of Centre for Fine Art Research, BCU; and Prof. John Roberts, Professor of Art and Aesthetics, University of Wolverhampton.